As we seek to cultivate our understanding of the kind of music we should be offering to God—and the corollary of what we as a congregation should be learning how to perform—we find that we come up against another challenge.
Church musicians come up against a greater challenge than other artists do. Some of this is a help and some of it is a great hindrance, and we need to work through it. Poets, and sculptors, and painters, and such generally do not face much amateur competition. But in the realm of music, virtually everyone is either a performer or a DJ with a listening audience of one. We are surrounded by music all the time, we create our own playlists, we form our own bands, we write our own songs, and we form our own decided opinions. Nothing wrong with any of this, but the fact that virtually everyone handles music and decides on music does create a set of challenges.
Now we want the music we learn how to offer to God to become the driving music that informs the rest of our music. This does not mean that our folk music, or our high end music, will be stylistically identical to what we do here. But all creational music shares the same principles—it will be tonal, it will be rhythmic, it will be melodic, and so forth. Blues, jazz and folk build on the same creational foundation, even though stylistically they are not appropriate for what we do here.
So when we try to sort out what kind of music we use in worship, we distinguish between two different kinds of “inappropriate.” One is inappropriate because of the kind of occasion this is, not because there is anything wrong with the music itself. You wouldn’t play romantic mood music at a kindergartner’s birthday party, and you wouldn’t play a lively ragtime piece here. But there is another kind of music, sadly popular even among Christians, that is inappropriate here because it is inappropriate everywhere. Music that is cacophonous all the down, or dissonant all the way through, is not to be relegated to a certain part of your life—rather it is to be repented of.